Monday, December 29, 2014

"If Those are the blessing I can recieve in the Temple, then I want them!"

Hey all!

How's life nos Estados Unidos? Tudo Bem? Life
here in Brazil is going pretty well. We had another baptism this past
Saturday, his name is S. He is such an amazing guy, I've
thoroughly enjoyed getting to know him. My companion wanted me to perform
the baptism too! That was pretty cool. He's so eager to live the
gospel, its truly incredible. The last lesson that we taught him was
about the temple, and he really wants to go to the temple. He didn't even
ask ´´how on earth am I going to get to Campinas?´´ but basically said ´´if
those are the blessings that I can receive in the temple, then I want
them!´´ We also have three new investigators. It was kind of funny,
they seemed pretty disinterested when we first contacted them. Its a
family of a grandma, her daughter, and the daughters son. We met the
grandma because we were walking by on the street and she was sitting on the
sidewalk in a lawn chair. Elder A. just started talking to her, and
she let us into her home. There we met her daughter and grandson.
They gave us some water, and we asked if we could come back the next day and
share our message with them. They said yes, but didn't seem to excited
about it. Initially, we weren't even going to go back. When people
are that uninterested, you usually just move on. Elder A. felt that
we should though, and so the next day we stopped by and shared the first
lesson, the restoration with them. It was so cool seeing how drastically
their attitudes changed as we told them about the first vision and the
restoration of the fullness of the gospel. Its a pretty interesting
message! We've got angels, visions, prophets, the whole 9 yards! We
then invited them to do what Joseph Smith did, and pray to God and ask him if
what we had taught was true. We are going to meet with them again
tomorrow, I'll let you know how it goes.

The language is coming along very well! It's still
pretty difficult to understand what people are saying, and sometimes people get
really frustrated because I cant understand what they're saying. I just
have to keep working at it though, and the language will come. I think we
are probably teaching somewhere between 5 and 10 investigator lessons each
week, but I don't know the exact number. We are working hard to talk to
more people too.

Its getting so much easier! At the beginning of my
mission I was a little afraid to talk to people, but now the fear is almost
gone. There's still a little, but its wearing off pretty quick.

I've attached a couple of pictures from the baptism
too. I hope you enjoy those! I love you all so much, talk to you in
a week!